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As typecasting goes, Neanderthals have had it pretty bad, frequently portrayed as brutish, flat-headed, grunting beasts with less culture than a tub of yoghurt. Whenever archaeological evidence suggests otherwise, the credit usually goes to co-habitation with Homo sapiens.

But Dr Zenobia Jacobs thinks these ancient humans have been unfairly pigeonholed, and is building up her case for a more 'modern' Neanderthal using nothing more than a grain of sand.

Jacobs goes by the exotic-sounding title of 'geochronologist', which she says generally raises more questions than it answers.

"I don't think people really get what it means, so it's sometimes easier to start off explaining that I'm an archaeologist interested in old things and you need to determine the age of old things," she says, "and that's where the chronology comes into it."

Jacobs is pioneering a technique called 'optically stimulated luminescence dating' to determine the age of archaeological finds — more specifically, when the sediments in which those finds are buried were last exposed to sunlight, which gives a reasonably accurate age of the artifacts themselves.

"Sediment is actually quite useful because it's everywhere, so we know we can date every layer in the site," says Jacobs, ARC QEII Research Fellow at the University of Wollongong.

In the dark

Optically-stimulated luminescence dating uses radiation measures to determine how long since an individual grain of sand was buried.

"The moment it can't see sunlight anymore, the clock starts ticking," Jacobs explains.

Unfortunately, this means the grains of sand to be dated cannot be exposed to sunlight for even a second, or the clock gets reset, so she does much of her work at night, under blackout sheets or in a darkroom.

But it's a small price to pay for correcting what Jacobs sees as a slightly unfair stereotype of Neanderthals.

"When you look at the archaeological remnants, they weren't that stupid," she says. "Even from an anatomical perspective, they have the right equipment in place to speak and to use language."

"They also have the same genes that we use to control language, so they certainly had the capacity anatomically."

To answer the question of whether Neanderthals used language and how that ability might have developed, Dr Jacobs works at sites in France and Africa containing artifacts from Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens.

The challenge is to put archaeological evidence of Neanderthal and Homo sapien behaviours on a common time scale so they can be compared to each other.

"Did Neanderthals and modern humans independently develop some of these cognitive capacities or did it only happen when the two species came into contact?"

"The key thing is the time, because if you look at Neanderthal behaviour, 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, it might be that they have been influenced heavily by modern humans coming into Europe, and integrating."

"But if we can actually show similar Neanderthal behaviour to what we would consider modern human behaviour that dates back to 100,000 years ago, we would know modern humans weren't in Europe," she says.

Human migration

Optically-stimulated luminescent dating may also help unravel the puzzle of human migration beyond Europe to south-east Asia and Australia.

Jacobs and colleagues are using the technique to more accurately date Australian archaeological discoveries such as skeletal remains and stone tools in the hope it will help explain how and when Aboriginal people first colonised Australia.

It might also help to understand mysteries such as the DNA connection between a finger bone found in a Russian cave and the genetic heritage of people living in south-east Asia, Papua New Guinea and possibly Australian Aborigines.

"I think we have an extremely simplistic view of human dispersals in the past, largely because we have big slabs of the Earth — in particular of China and Russia — that are completely unexplored."